From Crisis to Competitive Advantage: AI-Driven Strategic Management and Sustainable Business Growth in Lebanon
AI-driven strategic management; organizational resilience; sustainable business growth; crisis severity; digital transformation capability; leadership agility; Lebanon; PLSSEM
AuthorsAbstractLebanon's business landscape over the past six years has been shaped by a compounding sequence of shocks: currency collapse, banking-sector paralysis, the Beirut port explosion, political instability, and regional conflict spillover. Within this environment of chronic uncertainty, organizations that survive and grow are distinguished less by the resources they hold than by the strategic capabilities they exercise. This conceptual paper proposes and develops a research model examining how AI-driven strategic management influences sustainable business growth through the mediating mechanism of organizational resilience, with crisis severity, digital transformation capability, and leadership agility proposed as boundary conditions that shape the strength of this relationship. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, the resource-based view, and the emerging literature on AI-augmented decisionmaking, the paper argues that artificial intelligence functions not merely as an operational efficiency tool but as a strategic sensing, adaptive, and reconfiguration mechanism that allows organizations to absorb shocks, recombine resources, and pursue sustainable growth trajectories even under conditions of severe volatility. A cross-sectional survey design targeting 300– 500 managers across Lebanese banks, manufacturing firms, retail businesses, technology companies, healthcare organizations, universities, and SMEs is proposed, with PLS-SEM recommended as the analytical technique given the model's complexity, the exploratory nature of several constructs, and the moderated-mediation structure involved. The paper contributes a contextgrounded framework for understanding AI's strategic role in crisis-prone emerging markets and offers practical guidance for managers and policymakers operating in volatile institutional environments. 1. Introduction Strategic management theory has traditionally been built on assumptions of relative environmental stability, where firms formulate strategy, allocate resources, and pursue growth within reasonably predictable competitive boundaries. Lebanon offers a striking counterexample. Since 2019, Lebanese organizations have operated through a currency devaluation exceeding 90 percent, an unresolved banking crisis that severed firms from formal capital markets, the physical and economic aftershocks of the Beirut port explosion, chronic political paralysis, and — more recently — direct exposure to regional conflict. In this setting, strategic management is not an exercise in optimization under stable conditions; it is an exercise in continuous adaptation under compounding uncertainty. Artificial intelligence has entered this environment as both an operational necessity and a strategic differentiator. Lebanese banks have deployed AIbased fraud detection and liquidity forecasting tools to navigate an unprecedented liquidity crisis; retailers and manufacturers have used AIdriven demand forecasting to manage currency-driven supply shocks; and universities and healthcare organizations have accelerated AI adoption in decision support as traditional planning horizons collapsed. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ejprd.org- Published by Riset Publishing Services LLC.
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